


Social Isolation

by Head_Of_Ianus



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, Isolation, Minor Character Death, Q Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:34:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25130218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Head_Of_Ianus/pseuds/Head_Of_Ianus
Summary: Eventually, everyone had left and Q had ended up on his own, lonely and isolated from the rest of the world. He doesn't know when it starts, but slowly, the bitterness settles in and takes up the empty space in his heart, and he doesn't bother to fight against it.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16





	Social Isolation

**Author's Note:**

> For the "Isolation" square from the 007 Fest 2020 Angst Prompt Table.

Maybe it had started with Bond leaving them all to rot.

Years of cultivating friendships and trust thrown away for the delusion of having a life away from MI6 with a pretty lover, as a civilian, or something akin to it. Bond still had been shot dead by some assassin or another, but they had only figured that out much later. For a while, Q had been sure Bond would return eventually because usually, he always did. He didn‘t this time. Q often thought how pointless it all had been, trying to run away and still being murdered for MI6. But Bond had never understood that there was a line between their world and everyone else's world. He‘d never understood that he simply couldn‘t cross that line anymore, after so many years, and then he had died trying.

As he got up, Q grimaced at the chill occupying his flat nowadays. He had been woken by the shrill scream of his alarm instead of insistent meowing, asking for cat food, but it had been like that for a while now. Outside his bedroom window, London was coming alive, and it looked exactly as it always did.

Maybe it had started when Moneypenny died.

That had been on another rainy Tuesday, and Q hadn‘t thought much of it when M had asked him up to his office, not until he had passed Bill's thousand-yard-stare and Eve's empty desk. He had never forgiven M for insisting that how Eve had died was confidential, out of his pay grade. He just kept saying that it had been a tragedy. When they eventually attended her funeral, he and Bill stood next to each other wordlessly. They spent more evenings together afterward, mourning their friends, but Bill's eyes stayed empty, and more often than not they just drank and stared through each other. A young, polite lady replaced Eve eventually. Q could hardly stand looking at her sitting at Eve's desk without being furious.

The face that stared back at him from the mirror had wrinkles around its mouth and on its forehead and it was bitter. His hair had started greying and thinning out years ago, and some days he struggled to recognize himself. Not that it mattered much anymore. He left his flat around the same time he always did, skipping breakfast.

Maybe it had started when Bill had decided to leave MI6.

That hadn‘t come as a surprise. He had never been entirely the same after Eve, some of his warm and patient demeanour replaced by quiet grief and bitterness. They all had treated Bond dying as a sign that he was going to pop back up at MI6 with a smirk sooner or later, but when Eve died, it had been enough for them to just give up on both of them. He had tried to call Bill every week at his new workplace at first, but it wasn‘t the same, there was a new, insurmountable distance between them. Every week turned into every month and then into every year and then into rarely ever. 

The employees in his Branch these days were nothing like his minions had been. Or maybe they were, but Q felt nothing but grey indifference towards them. There was no glow of pride left in him when they managed to develop something particularly outstanding, no in-jokes between all of them. M had cut the budget years ago. They were little but a ruin of what they once had been. Q was the ghost of a king still roaming his long rotten castle. Talk of wasted potential. Q didn‘t find it in himself to care as he watched them be dismantled.

It had all been over for him when M had retired.

M had said something about wanting to finish his work in a dignified manner. Q knew exactly what he had meant, that between the lines he was telling him he didn‘t want to die in the middle of Nowhere, Scotland, bleeding out after a mistake that was supposed to be long dead had returned. Even if he was the only one left to understand, it filled him with cold disdain, intense, freezing his guts. Q hadn‘t bothered to send M a card or gift to congratulate him on his retirement, and it had given him a joy bitter enough that it left an aftertaste. He executed orders from the new M without caring if they made any sense, without caring what their outcome would be.

At 9 pm, he took his tube back to his flat and thought about the city that he was supposed to love.  
There was nothing left to be loved about it. The buildings and streets were grey and rainy as they had always been, and the people on the tube with him were just as tired as him. There was nobody waiting for him here. In his flat, he had a picture of all of them together and smiling (god, it had been so long) hidden away somewhere on a hard drive and one of his secured networks. He rarely dared to look at it, these days. It only ever gave him a kick straight to the gut and an ache deep inside his chest. As the door of his tube opened and closed, Q – old, grey, bitter Q – buried his face in his hands and did his best not to outright sob as he felt his eyes burn with tears. God, he felt pathetic, pathetic because he was crying on the bloody tube, and lonely, lonely enough that he just wanted to curl up and not get up anymore. Still, he arrived at his station, and he got up (as always) and wondered for whom he was forcing his muscles to cooperate if there was no one left.

Later, as he unlocked his door, he thought that eventually, something new would have to give in. Maybe it would be him, someday. But tomorrow still he‘d be woken up by a shrill alarm instead of insistent meowing, asking for cat food.


End file.
